I keep thinking of houses I've spent time in - not even lived in, just visited - and wanting to cry because I'll never go back there. I've left too many houses behind. I remember that one in Italy that was open to the cicadas and the night and the spotlights in the garden. The pieces of pottery she showed us, Roman jars hauled up from the sea bed yesterday, bubbled with casts of sea creatures, limescale. The quiet emptiness of the inside, with the modern art and modern sofa. Everything around the hearth of the outside world. The garden. Spotless and quiet and new. And sitting outside eating pasta and smelling the lemon that's supposed to get rid of mosquitos.
Does trying hard count?
I don't know any more - or don't think I know - what good writing is. I've seen it and it's not like mine. I don't know what I'm doing. I throw handfuls of clay together and I think it's a vase until I see a real vase. I'm a monkey playing with a typewriter. I have lost everything.

so this is how it feels to be lonely

got a friend who does everything ten years before everyone else. Even her name was odd at school, now it's trendy. she's doing Valley of the Dolls style now, it'll be the next big thing.
walk through a suburb, watch the pretty small houses in the slanted autumn light, the sharp shadows of fallen leaves. catch a leaf. make a wish. see all these places, the chalet with the withered ivy and the small terrace garden in the back, the brown and orange seventies block, the deco 20s block in smart contrasting brick, the sensible shoe of a forties solid pad. all these places I could live could have a life in and none of them would be right none of them would work. they only work when I can't have them.
in other worlds there are versions of me who live in all these places, who are happy. who fit in and have a community and have friends and aren't lonely and see a shape to their lives.
I feel as if there is nothing inside me.

Agnosticism

Doubt is like being a fish in three dimensions of transparency, with no plant called faith to hide behind.
I changed my fish’s water the other day. I put in a new filter which circulates the water, drawing it through a sponge to pump it out again, clean. It hadn’t struck me that this would mean the fish, which had spent its entire life with me hanging simple in still water, or lying supine against a leaf, would suddenly find himself beset by steep currents, which whirled him around his tank and sucked his food (red mosquito larvae) away from him anti-clockwise.
As soon as I put him into the moving water, he panicked. He shot up to the surface, slapping the meniscus with his body, then nose-dived to the gravel. For a fish whose most strenuous daily activity usually involves proceeding slowly around his tank with the air of a grave abbot moving from refectory to chapel, this was startling stuff. I turned off the water filter, and he sagged in a corner, metaphorically clutching his heart and panting.What must it be like to feel your world, your reality, suddenly move in a way you could never have expected, could not have credited or understood if it was explained to you? To see the locus of your time and space, the base material of your reality, begin to move as if it were a train pulling out of a station? For the fish if not for me, the bush was burning, the atom was split.

On ugliness

Ugliness: even the word looks ugly. It sounds ugly. Say it. Ug, ug, it's a caveman throat-choke, a gag-reflex. The awkward ending, -ness, is glued on there as if it might fall off. A hack job of a word. Beauty, by comparison, is, if not a beautiful word, then a graceful one. The B leans back as if to admire its odalisque tail, the down-stroke of the y swings like a cat's tail, balancing the stretched ballerina arm of the B's up-stroke. In between is eau, water - pure and clean, a tasteful colour, like eau-du-nil. A word composed purely of vowels seems to vanish into its own transparency. Eau is a sigh, a zephyr breath.
Maybe it would be different if ugliness meant beauty, and vice-versa. Maybe then I would be admiring the mirror back-to-back symmetry of the gl, that in Italian is transparent as eau. I might admire the curling fronds of the ness, its curling over itself, its hissing train. But it still begins with a grunt, not a sigh. Maybe if ugliness meant beauty, ugliness would be beauty.

Writing is work, a lot of people say so. I say so. Writing is hard slog, nose to the grindstone stuff, it's technique, you work at it, you're not born with it. Talent doesn't exist, persistence does. Remember this is hard work, lad, tha'll have to put in the elbow grease if tha wants to be a writer. But is it really this much hard work or are a lot of people embarrassed about how easy it is? Male children's writers, in particular, adopt hard frowns, talk about paring down sentences, talk about people not realising how difficult it is, how they are in for a nasty shock. Women are more likely to talk about how much fun it is. I think it's okay for it not to really be that hard either. Don't hate yourself for being a writer, just forget about it and write.

Other people are searching for Robbie Williams

It means a lot to me, new windows in an old house. Not sure how. It has meaning, accumulated through days and years of watching net curtains shiver in the up-heat from radiators beneath. Stretched spines. Each house is sandwiched together with wires and pipes, contains a veining of enabling material, buried in walls, floors and ceilings. I know this network only as a hot point on the floor, a plug point.
The new windows are plastic, blunt and ugly. The old house is wooden, gracious, harmonious. Yet never rich enough to be protected.

Thought for the day: It is quite possible to have friends you really don't like at all, in fact it is possibly more common than otherwise.

Two women, one a mother with a toddler, one without. Both English speaking, but not as a first language. Both relatively affluent in appearance. In the children's section of a bookshop.
The toddler played with the books as they tallked. The non-mother was intent on buying presents for the toddler - picking up books, "Look. Don't you think this would be nice? He could play with the wheels. Or this. It's lovely, look at the flaps..." The mother resisted. "You have already bought him all these presents, and it's very nice, but..." The non-mother over-rode her, refused to listen. The mother's voice rose, quavered, not quite daring to openly revolt. "Too expensive," she protested. "But we see you so rarely," the other replied, "we would buy you more if we saw you more often."
The power struggle tensed the muscles in the air between them. One had something that challenged the other: the toddler, a baby, motherhood. The other had money, power - and somehow, back in the unknown mists of their shared history, a social ascendency that made her friend defer to her. Lady Bountiful. She didn't or wouldn't hear the genuine anxiety in her friend's voice as she tried to resist presents she didn't want. Now and then the mother tried to offer something, say 'Well, then, I must buy you something. I will get this and you can get this, cheaper one." A blank negative met her. There was persistence, atttrition. They were polite to each other, as two horses straining at the rope of a shared social plough. Relationships betwene girls turn very easily into relationships between women. Moebius band leads out of school, and no-one sees where the twist comes. We're back where we started, in the first year. And if she's going to buy your toddler presents, take him over, maybe that's the first and only time you can say no. Because she did say no, that woman, in the end, and it was hard, but she did it.

Balconies (pt.1)

We're constantly surrounded by buzz, by hum, by electric undercurrents of sound. There's no silence in a city night, no dark either, just a dirtier light. I hear my radiator ticking, my fridge humming, my computer whirring, cars outside keening, a faint hiss from the light bulb in the extractor hood above the cooker. That's all I can hear, if I turned them off I could hear more, I expect.
Outside, in the light well, the pigeons groom, bustle, hustle, push and sidle. On the cranes as you walk past, sometimes you hear squawking from above you - twittery squawking, harsh as gossip, a whole collection of it - and you look up and the crane, the swing arm that salutes the sky, is dotted with black spots that are birds. They must think them the tallest barest trees in the city. Sometimes you look up and it;s the parakeets. YOu have to squint against the light of the sky - white, grey, marble - to see them, but then you see the flash of green and there it is, the parakeets.
I want to tell you about the balconies, how there are so many of them. Brussels has the same weather as London, more or less, but it behaves as if it has a Medterranean climate. That's why I like it. London says 'We have rain all the time, let us not build balconies as we shall never sit on them.' Brussels says 'We have rain all the time. Let's build lots of balconies - elegant balconies, balconies with screen doors, balconies for Italian grannies to lean upon and fan themselves on, for mothers to hang out washing strung across the street on little pulleys, for children to play on tricycles on, for cats to peer over, for flags to be hung from when football games are on (or the country is in crisis), for strings of garlic and onion to be hung up to dry. Let us allow our facades to crack and crumbles in that nice interesting way they have, let us string electric wire haphazardly on the outside of buildings, let us put up a neon sign upon a neo-classical facade to advertise a Wok Shop.' Same premise, different conclusion. These balconies are the opposite of a raindance, they're a sundance. And so Brussels acquires a little Mediterranean laissez-faire, while London bites its nails and tries to get to work on time.
You can be happy in an art nouveau house, even if it's not very tasteful.